Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 1, 2009

Gmail's Labels Are More Customizable

Gmail's transition to labels-that-look-and-act-like-folders is finished: you can now use drag-and-drop to label messages. Labels no longer live in their own container and they're displayed below the built-in labels: inbox, spam, trash, etc.

To make room for other features, Gmail only displays the most frequently used labels and hides the other labels behind a "more" dropdown. The list of labels is now customizable: you can hide built-in labels and some of your labels, while changing their order. If you rarely check the "spam" label or you don't save drafts, you can hide the system labels from the settings page.

"You now have control over which of your labels show. We've done our best to get you started by automatically showing the labels you use most and hiding the rest. Label hiding is my favorite new feature, since it saves me from having to look through labels I rarely use. If I ever need to reach any of my old labels, I just click the "more" link," says Damian Gajda, from Google.

I don't see the new features in my Gmail accounts, but Google promises that the changes are rolled out today.

Update: Google wants to make labels more visible. If you didn't create labels, Gmail will add four labels for you: Personal, Receipts, Travel and Work. "When I joined the Gmail team, I was surprised to learn that only 29% of Gmail users had created any labels. We realized that if you didn't know about labels, it would be easy to assume Gmail had no way to organize your mail. Not only were "labels" unfamiliar, they were kind of hidden," explains Michael Leggett.

This will be a great addition to have. I don't have it yet, hopefully it will become available soon. If Gmail could develop a Thundermail like application and have all these features it will be awesome.

I can't understand yet why they disabled the right-side option. I agree with Christopher, it is in detriment to those who already found it extremely useful. They should leave it as now, letting people to decide if they want to keep it on the right or left side.

"Christopher Scollo said on July 1, 2009 11:50 AM PDT:For "power" users, the loss of the right-side labels labs feature is a detriment, since those users tend to have lots of labels that don't fit well in the left column without scrolling.

And the addition of drag-n-drop is insignificant to power users, since those users add 99% of their labels through automatic filters.# Christopher Scollo said on July 1, 2009 11:55 AM PDT:In fact, retiring right-side labels has made filters slightly less useful. Since I can no longer see all of my labels at a glance, I no longer want mails to by-pass the inbox"

I beg to differ. Power users don't use right-side labels and they hide all the labels with the new options.

Power users like a clean and simple interface so they use the "Go to label" feature from labs, together with keyboard shortcuts. "G" + "L", and you enter the label you want to view. The popup comes complete with autocomplete.

Ugh, I'm going to be completely honest - I HATE this new thing! Gosh, please go back to the way it was before, with right side labels as an option. It was SO much better for reasons I can't even begin to list. Not that it matters really, because everyone's already pretty much given all their reasons, and that just about covers it.

I think that the new label system may be useful, but we need to be able to move the labels to the right side where the lab function allowed us to do so. If you check out the various threads, you will see that there are several already requesting the same thing. I have 41 labels, and loved them on the right side.

- hide the system labels you don't use frequently (starred, sent items, spam, trash).- show all the labels you've created and hide the labels that are rarely used.- if you use Gmail Chat and you still need more space, enable the "right-side chat" feature in Gmail Labs.- remember that Labs feature could disappear at any time and that you've used Gmail before there was a Labs section.

When I wrote my original comments, I had lost the right-side labels, but had not yet gotten the "hide less-used labels" feature. I now have the full upgrade and am less concerned, since I can now see my most important labels without scrolling. It probably would have been better to upgrade each account all at once.

The main point is to have the option to scan the labels to note the new mail. I will definitely put chat on the other side; wish I could put calender over there too - it would make sense to clean up and leave the left just for labels.p.s. how about labeling before sending? I wish there was a drop down so I could force a thread into a label from the start!

@JC: > Drag and drop is useless because you can't do it while reading a message. Easier just to use Move To menu.

Well, you can't drag & drop an opened message onto a label, but you can drag & drop a label onto an opened message. Still it will be good if Google allows us to drag & drop an opened message onto a label.

Firstly right side is gone. Thats BAD.But was it as hard to add a search option for those of us with hunderds of labels (just as label and move-to buttons have??). Now that Folders4Gmail is broken, I need it sorely.

I use many filters to move mail to the appropriate labels and skip the inbox...

...and I have a lot of labels. I used Folders4Gmail and the right-side labels lab to get a folder tree on the right. Because un-read counts bubble up through the label folders I could always see which categories had unread mail.

Now, today I have everything on the left and Gmail takes a useless stab at which labels I should have shown by default. Changing all labels to always show isn't very useful as I can't guess which set I should have visible at any given time. Moving chat to the right allows me about half of my labels visible - and even then only the most important are on the screen without if I name them in a manner to sort them differently. Either way I'm either clicking more and scrolling to get the labels I wasn't sure I'd need or I'm scrolling for Africa anyway because of a large label list...

The labels are alphabetically ordered which while the same as before is no longer a tree of folders. To keep contextually related folders listed adjacently without folders requires lengthy label names - this doesn't work because the label box clips the label.

It seems that the best I can achieve with this frustratingly hopeless UI change is to munge my label-names, try to guess which I'll want to see on any given day and spend my day clicking 'more' and scrolling for the rest.

Gmail, not your best moment.

PS: I'd review the alternatives and make use of the mail forwarding feature but I don't know whether there's a good Gmail alternative. Suggestions welcome.

I don't think it's strictly a move towards folders - although it does let people use them more like that, it also lets people use them more like labels - dragging them onto messages to stick there like postits

If people needed the space you can hide all the labels (including system ones) and one click will give you the whole list to look through - this will also give you *more* space on the left as spam, bin, starred and others can be hidden behind a dropdown menu of sorts

Hopefully right-side-labels will be back at some point, although probably not within a couple of days

I want the old one back! This drag and drop does not help me at all. I label my messages through filters to help me read related emails together. I don't read an email and assign it a label afterwards (this happens VERY VERY rarely).

I want to see ALL my labels on the right-side at any one time since I do filtering to skip inbox and label the messages.

Gmail Labs features and scripts that alter Gmail's code can stop working at any time. You should've known this before installing Folders 4 Gmail or adding the "right-side labels" feature. Some of the Labs features are more likely to be around and to become regular features (offline Gmail, tasks, gadgets), while others are just experiments.

"Gmail Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren't quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time."

The drag and drop functionality is nice for a quick way to label something, but really - anybody who's going to use labels correctly is going to apply labels with a filter; utilize a test search and then apply the label to all matched results and create a filter rule so they don't have to do it again. Beyond that; I was using Folders4Gmail - using both a greasemonkey script for Firefox, and an IE7Pro script for IE7 and I had all the functionality I wanted: "folders" with sub menus (utilizing the parentfolder/childfolder naming); I was able to expand or collapse a label menu with expandable or collapsable "folders" on the right or left hand side of Gmail - where ever I wanted it; and did not have to deal with the pesky drag and drop for the Gmail illiterate. How do I turn off drag and drop functionality????????????????

Gmail is "Beta" so I suppose anything about it can go away at anytime. Saying that Gmail Labs features that were very popular can just go away at anytime without notice is kinda snotty and a tad "evil".

This is quite useful for my personal email, but for corporate I use ALL of my labels nearly everyday. And now that I cannot have Labels on the right side, I can't see my calender, docs etc. It's horrible! PLEASE allow right side labels again... or atleast the ability to put everything else on the right side....

"Alex Chitu said on July 2, 2009 12:54 AM PDT:I don't see why you need the "right-side labels" feature:

- hide the system labels you don't use frequently (starred, sent items, spam, trash).- show all the labels you've created and hide the labels that are rarely used.- if you use Gmail Chat and you still need more space, enable the "right-side chat" feature in Gmail Labs.- remember that Labs feature could disappear at any time and that you've used Gmail before there was a Labs section"

Your "fix" wont do it. I need all my labels on the right side for easy and fast access. I used to have only labels on my right side just for that. And if you read all the comments above you are clearly a minority;-)

Personally, the "labels on the right" feature wasn't the dealbreaker for me, but I can certainly empathize with those who depend on it. For me it's the total crippling of Folders4Gmail. Don't tell me, Google, that hierarchical folder support was an undocumented feature exploited by some scripting opportunist - Google IMAP access has built-in support for organizing labels with slashes as hierarchical folders!!! So you acknowledge the hierarchy of such labels in Gmail! Don't take away the Folders4Gmail capability, please.

From the Gmail blog: "For those of you who created label names like _stuff or ++todo++ to force your most-used labels to the top..." Yes, for those of us who take control of our email reading rather than ceding control, Google says "screw you." This is the sad legacy of corporate software: make things seem easier for the lazy user by taking away control from the savvy user.

I dislike this new approach. I want the right-sided labels back. I thought Google was about letting users decide what they want. Now they are telling us what's good for us. Bring back the right-sided labels.

I agree with all those that are unhappy with the changes.They should have looked at people using folder4gmail and right hand labels (i.e. label power users) and how they affected them before doing this change (at least they should have tried not to break everything).People on lifehacker are not happy either http://lifehacker.com/5305514/gmail-gives-labels-the-folder-treatment

It is a creative idea that could be useful. I don't like it though since the labels show above the chat. I use 80+ labels and would like to un-hide them all. Can you add an option to put the labels below the chat?

I want right-side labels back, for the same reason as others above: I have a lot of labels, and a bunch of filters that bypass the Inbox, and I can no longer see the unread counts on non-Inbox labels without either clicking something or needing to scroll to get Chat.

For the moment I'm using right-side Chat as a workaround, but I would very much prefer to be able to achieve the layout I had before with right-side labels.

If the system labels now need to be kept together with the others so that they all get right-sided as a block, that's acceptable. But please, please bring right-side labels back in some form.

If there's any way you can do that automatically for people who used to have the old right-side labels Lab feature selected, that would be good too - I have set up many, many Gmail accounts for technologically naive people, all of which had right-side labels enabled, and I know for a fact that some of those people will *not* be able to find their way into the Settings page to put them back.

Terrible change which was implemented without asking and appears to be uninstallable except be repeatedly reverting to previous version each time you login (wonder how long that will last). I'm using folders4gmail which is now broken. I don't want to see all my labels, neither do I want to see only the mot used. I want to see major label headings with sublabels nested - which is hat folders4gmail gave me. This is not the first time that an 'improvement' has been foisted on us. If we cannot refuse the change then at least give us some control over it e.g. an option to disable it.

>>>I've managed to add 20 labels and they're all visible without having to scroll down (1280x800 resolution). I'm sure that the "right-side labels" feature couldn't fit more than 25 labels.

That does not help. Many people complaining here have 40+ to 80+ labels. They are able to view all the labels using right-side labels and Folder4Gmail grouping related labels together.

As someone said above, you are clearly part of the minority who are not affected by this "horrible" update.

I am also more concerned with the way Google rolled out this update than with the update itself. They should have tested it out and gathered feedback before rolling out such a drastic update. Don't tell me that Google didn't know people are using right-side label and Folder4Gmail.

>>Blogger Alex Chitu said on July 3, 2009 1:18 AM PDT:>>I've managed to add 20 labels and they're all visible without having to scroll >>down (1280x800 resolution). I'm sure that the "right-side labels" feature >>couldn't fit more than 25 labels.

As mentioned by Shirley you are missing the point: it is not only about seeing all of the labels (which folders4gmail allowed to handle in great numbers) but also in having quick access to other useful items:quick links and the calendar gadget are two key examples.

Now is a either / or situation (labels or quick links or calendar) and only if you have very few labels that you want to actively see.If you have many is simply a mess.

I like right-sided labels because I'm right handed and it made it easier to click on the label I wanted to view. I also like the fact that I can view only the labels I want to view. So ... I want it all!!!! And I want it now!!!! *G*

I agree the new label interface really attracting new label users. That is easy for them to use because they will have 4 default labels, likely the only four labels afterward. However, for old users of labels like me already have few hundred labels. The new feature only totally mess up my daily work. Imagine how a I could "drag and drop" to a correct label which may appears few pages below? It really doesn't help. On the other hand, I need click on the "more" button and scroll a few pages to get me correct labels. Previously, I could use Folder4gmail to provide a hierarchy structure to label, which is a function that Google not willing to provide. This change make me feel frustrated. Google is not a user friendly company any more. It becomes a big company who leave no option to users. Where is the next better company??